Judge Slams Trump Lawyers’ Shady Behavior in Deportation Case

A federal judge questioned the Department of Justice Friday over Donald Trump’s “expanded” use of the Alien Enemies Act to deport planefuls of immigrants without due process over the weekend.

During a hearing, U.S. District Judge James Boasberg said that Trump’s invocation of the centuries-old wartime law to declare the Tren de Aragua gang an invading force was “unprecedented,” and that the policy ramifications were “troublesome and problematic and concerning,” according to Politico’s senior legal correspondent Kyle Cheney, who documented the hearing in a thread of posts on X.

Boasberg explained that the Trump administration’s application had “expanded” the AEA’s use, whereas in other instances that the law has been invoked, such as during the War of 1812, World War I, and World War II, “there was no question there was a declaration of war, and who the enemy was,” according to Cheney.

Notably, the United States is not at war with Venezuela.

The judge said that the Trump administration’s application of the AEA was “a long way from the heartland” of the rule, according to journalist Adam Klasfeld.

Lawyers from the ACLU and Democracy Forward had challenged Trump’s use of the wartime law Saturday, asserting that several individuals the government claimed were gang members had been wrongly identified. Boasberg then ordered the Trump administration to temporarily pause deportations under the AEA, but the government continued with the removal of more than 250 individuals.

The Trump administration has refused to reveal the identities of those who were deported or any information on how immigration and customs authorities were able to determine that they were in fact gang members.

During the hearing Friday, ACLU attorney Lee Gelernt claimed that the deported Venezuelans were not given a “meaningful” chance to contest their designation as terrorists, and urged that future deportees should receive the opportunity to argue for their innocence, according to Cheney.

The Department of Justice said that habeas petitions would be made available to deportees to challenge their designation under the AEA, but it was unclear how they would fulfill those petitions if they were similarly rushed out of the country.

Boasberg implied that the Trump administration had been anxious to speed along the removal of the alleged gang members, signing the order to do so “in the dark.”

“It seems to me the only reason to do that is if you know it’s a problem and you want to get them out of the country before there are suits filed,” Boasberg said, according to Cheney.

Donald Trump bragged about releasing the Social Security numbers of hundreds of people during his anticlimactic release of the John F. Kennedy assassination files.

“Eighty thousand pages of documents is a lot to sift through,” a reporter said to Trump on Friday. “Can you just tell us who killed Kennedy?”

“Well, you know, I was given the task of releasing that. Many presidents have gone through it, and they haven’t released. And I said, ‘Release.’ We even released Social Security numbers, I didn’t want anything deleted,” Trump replied. “They said, ‘So what about Social Security?’ People long gone.… We gave Social Security, we gave everything. And the rest is for you to look at.”

These Social Security numbers are from potentially hundreds of people who are alive, not “long gone,” as the president wrongly claimed.

One of them, Reagan-era Justice Department attorney and Trump’s own former campaign lawyer Joseph diGenova, was furious about the release of his personal data. “I intend to sue the National Archives,” he told USA Today. “They violated the Privacy Act.”

A former Church Committee staffer also slammed Trump.

“Your Administration doxxed former public servants who staffed 1977-79 congressional investigation by revealing their SSNs. Many are still alive. Completely unnecessary & contributed nothing to JFK assassination understanding,” government accountability lawyer Mark Zaid wrote on X. “I trust you will provide them free credit monitoring.”

The federal government and its agencies are barred from sharing personal records without consent under the Privacy Act of 1974.

The Department of Homeland Security shut down its office in charge of investigating civil rights complaints on Friday.

DHS closed its Office for Civil Rights and Civil Liberties, which was created along with the department in 2002 to advise leadership on civil rights and liberties and to investigate agency complaints on everything from disaster response to immigration enforcement. Its 90 employees were told they will be paid through May 23.

There’s no word on whether the functions of the office will be transferred elsewhere, or what will happen to its $22 million in funding. But it comes as no surprise, considering the Trump administration’s efforts to reduce or eliminate oversight and civil rights offices in other departments. The civil rights division in the Justice Department, for example, has been directed to serve conservative culture-war aims, and much of its other work has been frozen.

The fact that the DHS’s office handles complaints against Immigration and Customs Enforcement was almost certainly a strike against it under this administration, which seeks to fast-track mass deportations regardless of complaints. To hard-line anti-immigration people on the right, civil rights and liberties are just further obstacles to getting rid of as many legal and undocumented immigrants as they can.

At the start of Trump’s second term, his campaign promise of fast-tracking mass deportations raised concerns that legal protections would be disregarded and civil rights violations would skyrocket as more immigrants were detained. Now that appears to be coming true, and getting rid of an office that would investigate those violations is certainly by design.

A federal judge tore into Justice Department lawyers Friday as they struggled to defend Donald Trump’s order banning transgender people from serving in the military. 

U.S. District Judge Ana Reyes said that she would not be “gaslit” by the lawyers’ attempts to convince her that the policy did not constitute a transgender ban, according to Politico’s senior legal affairs reporter Kyle Cheney.

“You’re saying one thing in public. You’re saying a different thing in court,” Reyes said, referring to Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s post on social media that referred to the policy as a ban. 

Earlier this week, Reyes had ruled that the Pentagon could not enforce the policy and had mischaracterized research and ignored evidence to support its conclusion to disallow transgender service members. Last week, Reyes stopped a hearing cold in its tracks so that the lawyers could actually read the studies mentioned, after she found that “virtually every” study cited in the ban contradicted support for Hegseth’s policy.

The judge noted in her ruling that the defense agreed that transgender people “can have the warrior ethos, physical and mental health, selflessness, honor, integrity, and discipline to ensure military excellence,” and that the government’s claims about their suitability for service were “pure conjecture.”

She delayed the order from going into effect until March 21, to give the Trump administration enough time to pursue an emergency appeal. 

In a new filing Friday, the Department of Justice asked Reyes to dissolve her preliminary injunction. Lawyers argued against her interpretation of Hegseth’s policy disqualifying service members who “have a current diagnosis or history of, or Exhibit symptoms consistent with, gender dysphoria.” The lawyers claimed this rule did not “discriminate against trans-identifying persons as a class.”

Reyes hit back at the lawyers during Friday’s hearing, pushing them to explain how Hegseth’s policy was addressing an actual problem in the U.S. military and not simply creating a “pretext” for discriminating against transgender people, according to Cheney.  

The judge noted there were already policies in place that required military officials to identify people with debilitating medical conditions—which would include those with gender dysphoria that rendered them unable to serve.

“Everything in the record is that it’s a pretext. There is nothing in the record that this was a deliberative process,” Reyes said. 

Will U.S. marching bands be replacing “God Bless America” with “God Save the King”?

Donald Trump had a bizarrely warm reaction to news that Britain’s King Charles would extend a “secret offer” for the United States to join the British Commonwealth, something that the Founding Fathers fought and died to exit nearly 250 years ago.

“I Love King Charles. Sounds good to me!” Trump posted on Truth Social Friday, recirculating the story.

It was not clear if Trump was serious or making an odd joke, but several U.K. outlets have reported that the unprecedented offer of “associate membership” is very much real. The Commonwealth is a volunteer association of 56 nations. The majority of them share history as former British colonies, including Canada, India, and Australia.

Charles is the head of the Commonwealth, as well as king of 15 of its member states. Five other members have different monarchs ruling over them, and 36 other members are republics.

The Daily Mail reported that the first extension of the hand-written offer was delivered to Trump by U.K. Prime Minister Keir Starmer during a visit to the White House last month.

A member of the Royal Commonwealth Society spoke with the Mail on the condition of anonymity about the matter, claiming that America’s potential entry into the Commonwealth was being discussed “at the highest levels.” They believed it would be “a wonderful move that would symbolize Britain’s close relationship with the U.S.”

“Donald Trump loves Britain and has great respect for the Royal Family, so we believe he would see the benefits of this. Associate membership could, hopefully, be followed by full membership, making the Commonwealth even more important as a global organization,” the person added.

As strange as the offer is, it could be an attempt by Charles to quell Trump’s hostility toward long-standing Western alliances as Europe braces for potential war with Russia.

Trump has continually agitated and aggravated America’s allies, positioning the nation as more of a global bully than a policeman, forcing some of America’s friends to reconsider the value of its military protection. Some of those injuries include Trump’s shocking hostility toward Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy during critical peace negotiations, his nonsensical trade war, his threats to annex Greenland, his whiplash decisions to suspend and un-suspend military resources and intelligence with Kyiv, his venom toward NATO, and his insistence on making Canada the nation’s fifty-first state.